Time of his Coming (Daniel 9:24-26)
Daniel 9:24-26 Seventy weeks are determined upon thy people and upon thy holy city, to finish the transgression, and to make an end of sins, and to make reconciliation for iniquity, and to bring in everlasting righteousness, and to seal up the vision and prophecy, and to anoint the most Holy. Know therefore and understand, that from the going forth of the commandment to restore and to build Jerusalem unto the Messiah the Prince shall be seven weeks, and threescore and two weeks: the street shall be built again, and the wall, even in troublous times. And after threescore and two weeks shall Messiah be cut off, but not for himself: and the people of the prince that shall come shall destroy the city and the sanctuary; and the end thereof shall be with a flood, and unto the end of the war desolations are determined.
The seventy weeks of Daniel has long been a source of much speculation among Biblical interpreters. Sir Robert Anderson, in his book "The Coming Prince", published in 1894, gave an interpretation of this passage that is still very popular with conservative Christians.
It is generally agreed by scholars that the seventy weeks refer to seventy weeks of years, or 490 years. Thus, Daniel appears to be saying that the Messiah would come sixty-nine weeks (483 years) after the "commandment to restore and build Jerusalem". Anderson started by trying to locate this decree that Daniel referred to in verse 25. There are four such decrees recorded in the Bible - the decree of Cyrus to rebuild the Temple, given in 538 BCE (Ezra 1:1), a decree of Darius I to allow work to continue on the Temple, given in 517 BCE (Ezra 6:6-12), a decree of Artaxerxes I to allow some of the Jews in his kingdom to return to Jerusalem to assist with the rebuilding of the Temple, given in 458 BCE (Ezra 7:11-26), and finally, another decree of Artaxerxes I to allow Nehemiah to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the city itself, given in 445 BCE (Nehemiah 2:1-8).
Of these, Anderson reasoned, only the fourth actually mentions the city itself, as required by Daniel 9:25. This then becomes the starting point of Daniel's sixty-nine weeks. From 445 BCE, 483 years takes us to about 37 CE, which seems a little late for Jesus. In order to get around this problem, Anderson noted that the Jews used a lunar calendar of twelve months by thirty days, or 360 days. This view seems to be reinforced by Revelation 11:2-3, where forty-two months is said to be 1,260 days. Using a year of 360 days, the sixty-nine weeks come out to 32 CE, which, says Anderson, corresponds to the year that Jesus was crucified.
There are several problems with this approach. To begin with, the Jews did not simply use a lunar year of 360 days. Such a calendar would quickly get out of sync with the solar year, leading to severe problems for farmers. To counter this, an extra lunar month was added every two or three years to arrive at an average year of 365 days.
Another problem relates to the choice of the decree of Artaxerxes I given in 445 BCE. A close reading of Nehemiah 2:1-8 will fail to turn up any reference to such a decree. All we find is that Artaxerxes gave Nehemiah letters of safe conduct, and permission to use lumber from the royal forests to assist in the rebuilding project that was already underway.
To what, then, does Daniel's seventy weeks actually refer? The answer to this question is not easily found, for several reasons. Among these are the fact that the Hebrew text of Daniel 9 appears to be corrupt. The Jerusalem Bible, for example, notes that one or more words seem to be missing from verse 26, making translation very difficult. To compound this problem, Daniel seems to display some confusion about the Persian period. For example, he claims in chapter 11 that there would be four Persian kings before the coming of Alexander the Great. In fact, there were nine. Since this period makes up part of Daniel's seventy weeks, it is not possible to determine how long Daniel though the Persian period was.
If we look at Daniel 9 in context, however, we can make an educated guess as to its intended meaning. We should note first of all that internal and external evidence points to a date of the late second century BCE for the book of Daniel. More specifically, the book of Daniel was written in about 164 BCE, in response to the persecutions visited upon the Jews by the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The actions of the "prince that shall come" in Daniel 9:26 match the atrocities of Antiochus.
A further problem is raised by the fact that Christians tend to read this passage with a pre-conceived bias. When they see the word "Messiah", they automatically assume that Daniel must have been referring to Jesus. This is not so. The word "Messiah" simply means an anointed one, and can refer either to a king or to a priest. It should further not be assumed that Daniel was referring to the same person in verses 25 and 26. He may have been stating that seven weeks would result in "an anointed one, a prince" (9:25), and sixty-two weeks would result in "an anointed one" who shall be "cut off" (9:26). There is no reason to assume that these two Messiahs are the same person.
The KJV translation of verse 25 has further confused the issue. The word that the King James committee chose to translate "commandment" in fact simply means "word", and it is the same noun that Daniel used in 9:2 when he refers to the "word of the Lord" that came to Jeremiah. And it is this fact that gives us a clue to the meaning of the seventy weeks. Daniel says that he was reading the book of Jeremiah, specifically the part where Jeremiah predicted that the Israelites would be in bondage for seventy years (Jeremiah 25:11-12). To a Jew living at the time that the Babylonian exile ended, this might have seemed plausible. However, to a Jew living during the Hellenistic period, as the author of Daniel was, Jeremiah's prophecy seemed like a bitter irony. The decree of Cyrus to allow the captives to return to Jerusalem had not resulted in independence for the Jews. The Persians maintained a firm hold on Palestine for the next two centuries, as did the Greeks after them. How then was Daniel to understand Jeremiah's prophecy?
Daniel re-interprets the prophecy to be seventy weeks of years, or 490 years of servitude (9:24). The starting point of this period was the "word" that came to Jeremiah concerning the rebuilding of Jerusalem (Jeremiah 30:17-18). The first seven weeks was the approximately forty-nine years that the Jews spent in Babylon (587 to 536 BCE). The first "anointed one" was probably Cyrus, who is called the Lord's Messiah by second Isaiah (44:28). It is not clear from verses 25 and 26 whether the next sixty-two weeks were to follow the seven, or to start at the same time as the first seven. Given Daniel's confusion about the Persian period, it is not really possible to answer this question. In any case, it appears that Daniel intended the next sixty-two weeks to end in his own time, with the murder of the high priest Onias III in 171 BCE. The final seven weeks would result in the defeat and death of Antiochus, from 171 to 164 BCE. As it happens, Daniel was almost right. Antiochus died in Persia in 163 BCE, and Judea gained a temporary period of independence under the Hasmonean dynasty until the coming of the Romans in 63 BCE.
So, to sum up, there is no good reason to assume that Daniel 9 is a prophecy of Jesus. In order to do so, one has to ignore the separation of the sixty-nine weeks into seven and sixty-two (some scholars claim that the seven weeks saw the end of prophecy with the book of Malachi, but this view is generally rejected by most commentators), and further insert a gap of unspecified duration between the sixty-ninth and the seventieth week, since it is clear that the crucifixion of Jesus was not followed by the end of the world, as the Christian reading of Daniel 9 would indicate.
